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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Saudi-Qatari rivalry spills onto the soccer pitch

Unable to
persuade Qatari leaders to drop their support for the Muslim Brotherhood and
other Islamist groups, Saudi Arabia appears determined to deprive its tiny
neighbour of its regional soccer supremacy.

A recent
decision to build 11 stadia under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company
(Aramco), one of the country’s most efficient, forward-looking institutions,
constitutes an effort to rival Qatar that is developing at least eight of the
Middle East and North Africa’s most advanced facilities in advance of its
hosting of the 2022 World Cup. It also signals the end to a debate in the
kingdom on whether to emphasize individual rather than team sports in its
five-year national sports plan in a bid to prevent soccer pitches from becoming
venues of protest as elsewhere in the region.

The Saudi
decision to battle Qatar on the soccer pitch followed the withdrawal five
months ago of the ambassadors of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain
from Doha. It came as Gulf rulers acknowledged that deep-seated differences
notwithstanding, they needed to cooperate in confronting the most significant
threat facing them: the rise of the Islamic State, a militant jihadist group
that controls a swath of Syria and Iraq with a population larger than that of
several of the wealthy, oil-rich sheikdoms.

A crisis
meeting in Jeddah this weekend of Gulf leaders focused on countering the
Islamic State threat avoided mention of the rift with Qatar, one of the most
serious crisis in the almost three-decade old history of the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC), which groups Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates,
Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. A flurry of meetings in recent weeks including a
visit by Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to Saudi King Abdullah and
talks last week in Doha between Tamim and a Saudi delegation that included
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal, intelligence chief Prince Khaled
bin Bandar, and Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef failed to narrow
the Qatari-Saudi gap.

The decision
to build the stadia and the significance attributed to it by assigning the task
to Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, which has been tasked in the past with
key projects such as the development of the King Abdullah University of Science
and Technology (KAUST), a research focused institution that is not bound by
gender segregation and other religious restrictions, highlighted the
deep-seated roots of soccer in the kingdom.

It also signalled
the fact that Saudi rulers afraid in the wake of the role that militant soccer
fans played in the 2011 toppling of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as well as
the 2012 resignation of Prince Nawaf bin Faisal as head of the Saudi Arabia
Football Federation (SAFF) and his replacement this year as head of the Saudi
Youth Welfare Presidency accepted that seeking to de-emphasize soccer in favour
of sports that evoked less deep-seated emotions was politically too risky.

The plans
for the new stadia made no mention of including facilities for women
spectators, an indication that efforts by more progressive elements of the
political hierarchy and soccer establishment have so far failed to make the
game more inclusive. Similarly, the national sports plan is being designed for
men only, reinforcing the notion that the kingdom and the Islamic State draw
their inspiration from a shared puritan interpretation of religious texts
despite the fact that Saudi rulers view the group as one, if not the most
serious threat they are confronting.

The
announcement of plans for new stadia followed a number of trial balloons
floated by the kingdom in the past year testing the waters for a greater role
in world sports. Some reports suggested that the kingdom was considering
bidding for international sports events, which risk putting it under the international
spotlight and exposing it to criticism like happened with Qatar’s handling of
foreign workers.

Equally
unlikely are suggestions that the kingdom would field a credible candidate for
next year’s election of a president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Saudi Arabia is more likely to support the re-election of Sheikh Salman bin
Ebrahim Al Khalifa, a national of Bahrain, which is closely aligned with the
kingdom. Salman last year defeated hands down among others a Saudi national in an
interim AFC election.

Challenging
Qatar’s lead role as not only the region’s soccer hub but as an increasingly
important node in global soccer will take more than matching it in
infrastructure. While Qatar hardly ranks among the world’s most transparent and
accountable nations, it has less domestic soccer-related transparency issues
than the kingdom does.

Prominent
Saudi businessmen, including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a prominent member of
the Saudi ruling family and one of the world’s wealthiest men, and soccer
officials recently grumbled over government guidance in the awarding by SAFF of
soccer broadcast rights to Middle East Broadcasting Center Group (MBC) in a
deal worth 3.6 billion Saudi riyals or $960 million.

The deal with
MBC, which is chaired by Sheikh Waleed Bin Ibrahim Al Brahim, an in-law of
Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family, was rushed through in an effort to
pre-empt a possible bid by beIN Sports,
the sports channel of the Qatari state-owned Al Jazeera network. MBC’s
flagship, Al Arabiya, was founded as a counterweight to Al Jazeera. SAFF
president Ahmed Eid Al Harbi justified the decision as having been taken in
consultation with senior government officials because there were national
issues involved that were “larger than soccer.”

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute
of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the
same title.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile